The temptation to project season-long narrative arcs from just a handful of Premier League matches is irresistible, the pull genuinely overwhelming.
It doesn’t matter how many times we are proved wrong or how many caveats we place upon the opinions we form they are always, secretly, firm conclusions.
That’s just the nature of the modern content machine and of the short-termism that dominates our culture. Everyone gets drawn in and nothing will stop us believing we know enough after three rounds of the season to set the scene for what’s to come over the next eight months.
Arsenal will walk through the campaign beating pretty much everyone in their path. Coventry will sink. Aston Villa and Tottenham have changed too much. Newcastle really needed all that change, actually. Hull are the surprise package. We were wrong about Everton, right about Crystal Palace.
But of all the predictions getting set in stone this week one stands out as particularly egregious: Manchester City are finding the post-Pep transition easy and will be Arsenal’s only challengers.
Man City are top of the table, so fair enough. But they have also sneaked past Bournemouth in an opening weekend game they were losing until the 84th minute, beat a dreadful Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park, and were very lucky to squeeze through a home game against Coventry with a 1-0 victory despite allowing two one-on-ones in the match.
All we can really say with any degree of confidence is that Enzo Maresca is Arne Slot, one way or another. City are either Liverpool in 2025/26, a shaky winning streak masking deeper issues, or they are Liverpool in 2024/25, handling the transition from a club-legend seamlessly.
Enzo Fernandez and Elliot Anderson should make a world-beating central midfield, in theory, and if you look across that first XI it is surely the best in the division; a near-Galactico level of talent in every position, from Gianluigi Donnarumma to Rayan Cherki to Antoine Semenyo to Erling Haaland.
That may well be enough to create a charge at Arsenal similar to Slot’s debut campaign: an extremely talented squad combining the muscle memory of Guardiola’s tactics with a refreshing (and less intense) approach from the new boss, whose in-game tweaks could offer enough to rejuvenate a team that should never really be too far from a 90-point season.
That depends on Fernandez and Anderson covering the Rodri gap, as well as on Marc Guehi and Ruben Dias settling as a two, but it is easy enough to imagine.
The problem is, every game so far has also alluded to Man City being in an alternative timeline, skipping the post-Klopp afterglow and heading straight into the difficult transition.
Like Slot, the accusation most often levelled a Maresca is that his football is too similar to his other great love, chess: slow and boring, with an emphasis on rigid positional play that looks more like a caricature of a Guardiola team than the real thing.
In a Premier League that has returned to fast transitions and high pressing this season, that could be a serious issue.
Coventry have already shown us how. By defending very deep they let Man City go stale in possession (with 79%), recreating the tactical patterns of a few years ago, the very patterns that led to Guardiola loosening his principles.
Sure enough, in late Pep style, the best moments for City came from improvising playmakers - the very thing Maresca’s chess-ball stands against.
“The way he dribbles past players, just gliding through, it was amazing to see,” Haaland said of debutant Iliman Ndiaye.
“He needs to understand how to move,” was Maresca’s take on Ndiaye. “Most of the time he was moving in the wrong way, wrong position, but he needs to learn and for sure he is going to learn.”
If the idea is to restrict the Man City players with a style of positional possession football no longer in vogue in the Premier League then Maresca might find the goals dry up.
Alternatively, those kinds of tactical insights could roughly align with the level of control Arsenal have managed under another of Guardiola’s mentors, Mikel Arteta.
Add Cherki’s star power and Haaland’s finishing to a more sophisticated and measured game-plan and maybe Man City will keep eking past opponents.
Elsewhere, Josko Gvardiol has already emerged as a proper Maresca full-back, which is the manager’s greatest contribution to the Premier League; Gvardiol played almost as a ten at Palace, swarming the half-spaces not unlike Marc Cucurella at his Chelsea best.
The midfield should find balance with time, and indeed if the middle is technically City’s weakest area (for now) then Maresca’s doubling-down on positional discipline and compressing space ought to prove particularly useful.
The Manchester derby should be a good test of that, and indeed a good test of which version of Slot Man City are getting.
Michael Carrick will sit his team behind the ball and seek to advance only on the counter-attack, mimicking the way he beat Man City 2-0 in his first game in charge back in January and broadly mimicking Coventry’s approach.
If City can stay in control and counter-press effectively enough to limit United’s breaks, we will see the best side of the Guardiola inspiration. If there are more defensive errors, more erratic football, and a smash-and-grab United win, then the crash back down to earth will hint at a tough transitional year.
Or not. There we go again.
The fourth round of the Premier League season will not prove or disprove anything and the real Maresca’s Man City will only very slowly emerge over the coming months.
But ahead of a huge game for both clubs it’s impossible to resist. Until the league table settles, every game will be a referendum on Maresca.
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